Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Turns out I don't enjoy City of Heroes at all. I don't know if it just feels like the worst parts of grinding in World of Warcraft only more boring, or if I'm just burned out on MMORPGs completely.

CoH has definitely missed the mark though. One of the most fun things about WoW is that you find cool items, or earn enough to buy cool stuff at auction. A neat new sword or a cool ring that made your player unique. Nobody is unique in CoH. Everyone has one set of very few optional abilities, and the only thing that sets you apart is the color of your tights. WoW is the opposite. While everyone essentially looks the same as everyone else who shares their race, the items and abilities define each player much more than their costume.

The character generator in CoH is definitely awesome. There's just not that much to do, but you have to do a lot of it to gain experience and advance in levels. Unless you like interrupting muggings. There's a person getting mugged every 20 feet in CoH. Problem is, if the muggers are too low level, you are just wasting your time rescuing the poor victim. But what kind of hero walks by a person getting mugged just because they don't profit from the experience. It doesn't make you feel very heroic to run by a little old lady being pushed around by thugs just because the attackers are weaklings compared to you.

I also neglected the fact that I cannot cancel my WoW account because I'm not the only player in my household. I forgot that Mrs. Bogey also has some WoW characters and even though she hasn't logged on in months, she bristled when I told her I was considering putting the game aside for a while.

So it looks like I'm back to grinding honor points by doing battleground after battleground so I can save up for a week to buy a ring with 22 more resilience points.

Monday, July 28, 2008

I really ran out of steam when I quit playing poker obsessively. Maybe it's that there's nowhere to play live around here. I haven't played in a Casino since Vegas, and I haven't played in a home game since last year. No poker = no inspiration.

Besides, it would never be as funny or satirical as The Melted Felt. Go there for some seriously funny (get it? seriously funny? fuck you that's gold) poker comedy.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Twitter wiped out all my following and followers because they had to restore from a backup or something. I'm really too lazy to go through all those people and add them again, so lets hope they finish their restore process and get all that back.

I'm sure I'll be bored at work again sometime in the near future when I will be able to set all that up again, but it ain't today.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

The latest expansion for World of Warcraft is scheduled for November of this year, but if you know anything about Blizzard, they haven't made a deadline in a coon's....er some non-redneck expression that means "forever." I've played my Hunter for over a year, getting him up to level 70 and getting him all the best PVP gear by grinding the battlegrounds. I even created a Druid and leveled him up to 70 and started PVPing. It's rough, because without the gear you really get your ass kicked in by guys who basically have the stuff that my Hunter has.

It has gotten a bit repetitive and tiresome and the light at the end of the tunnel is 5 months away, even if you're optimistic about Blizzard's ability to meet a schedule.

A coworker of mine mentioned he had played City of Heroes and while it gets old pretty fast, it's fun for a limited period of time. We speculated for a while if it would get us through to the WoW upgrade and I finally bit the bullet and signed up for the game last night. He renewed his account and we were off like a dirty shirt.

Seems like the most interesting part of the game is creating your super hero/super villain, along with picking out his costume. There has to be a near infinite number of options. I laughed that the very first physical options are "male" "female" and "huge." I never thought of "huge" as a gender before. I guess you get to a certain size and you become asexual, or at least undesirable to anyone. Maybe I'd better put this pop-tart down.

I ground my way up through some missions and got my super hero to level 4. I created a bow-and-arrow type hero that's pretty similar to the Marvel character "Hawkeye" from the Avengers comics. My costume is fairly unique and I did manage to throw in some poker imagery as I have a big diamond on my chest. I'm pretty sure all the suits were available, but the diamond fit best with the style and color scheme I chose. There, now this qualifies as a poker post.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

I joined in the fun at Twitter last week. It's like blogging, only even more pointless. You only have 140 characters, so you can really only get one idea across, and not very well.

But it's like methadone for bloggers. You don't get the same satisfaction from writing a blog post, but it gets your ideas out in the tubes.

Reading twitters is just like reading blogs, only a lot less interesting. At first it seems more involving because most of the people twittering are doing what they're talking about at that very moment. But the lack of detail and artistry makes it a very unsatisfying info dump.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

It's 3:23AM and I'm still up because I'm following Iggy's chipstack via Dr. Pauly. It's almost like a sickness.

I'm supposed to drive clear across Jacksonville tomorrow with the family. I wonder if they'll get upset if I let someone else drive and pass out in the car on the way?

It may not happen anyway as Mrs. Bogey has had some kind of violent allergic reaction to something. rash and hives all over her body. As we are on Vacation and nowhere near our preferred medical system, I took her to a Urgent Care. They turned us away because she didn't have her ID. She lost it somewhere. My ID and about 20 other non-picture IDs weren't good enough. No ID no health care. Good thing it wasn't serious. I suppose I could have been pretending someone else was my wife just to get them on my medical insurance fraudulently. Seems like they were being very cavalier about someone with a health crisis going on. Especially when we offered to pay cash - screw the insurance. Still no-go. They sent us down the road.

I found another Doc-in-the-Box inside a Wal-Mart and the girl at the counter was brand new and not bright enough to know that you had to have ID to get health care there. She accepted my ID and insurance information. The doc there was amazing. She prescribed a $4 generic steroid, gave us a $4 solution for the inevitable stomach upset caused by the steroid, and for the itching and rash? Windex. No shit! Amazingly, the Windex worked. Benadryl spray at $10 per ounce? No good. Windex at $10 a gallon? Totally effective. The father from "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" was right. I wonder if I'm the first husband to douse his wife with Windex in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart?

Mrs. Bogey just wandered through and reports that something must be working because the hives are all gone and she woke up itch free. Looks like we may be traveling tomorrow after all.

Well, it's past 2:30 now....should I stay up and click refresh on Tao of Poker a few more hundred times? Maybe another $3.50 Super Turbo SNG at Full Tilt. 300 starting stacks and 3 minute blinds. They're like crack cocaine you know...

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

So I was searching for some poker bloggers....and poof! They were gone from Google. Ugh. It sucked.

But then it occurred to me. Google isn't the only search engine on the intertubes. I searched the exact same names on Yahoo, and BAM! There they were. All of us, right where we belong.

And I think I'll do all my searching and finding on Yahoo from now on. Or MSN. Or AltaVista. Or HotBot. Or Lycos, the place the bought the company that hosted my first online email address. The place I used exclusively until I succumbed to the evil empire that is Nasdaq: GOOG.

Hell, I'll search anywhere but a search engine that doesn't let you find what YOU want, but wants you to find what THEY want you to find. Fuck them.

It seems like any blog that has banner advertising or affiliate advertising on their site gets automatically labeled by Google as being in violation of their indexing policy and is excluded from searches if such links don't use the "nofollow" guidelines.

I noticed this the other day when I went searching for a fellow authors blog and it didn't appear in my Google search. "That's odd," I thought to myself as this blogger has a very unique name, although his blog name is somewhat pedestrian. So I started searching for some other poker blogs, and NONE of them appear in the Google searches when I search for the name of the blog or the name of the blogger.

A bit of research into Google's new policy turned up that instead of checking all the blogs to see if they actually had original content and weren't just a bunch of affiliate advertisements, they just dropped the hammer on all of them. There is a method of getting Google to reconsider dropping your site from their index, but the process takes MONTHS. By then all poker blog advertising should have dried up completely.

I did take some small satisfaction in that a couple of the sites that once called me a "blogger whore" because I had a few sponsors (for example "Wired Pairs" which now sports 13 such advertisements) were also dropped.

It should be noted that NONE of these sites actually violate the terms of Google's requirements. If you provide original and unique content, you're in the clear. But it will take months for your site to be cleared, if it happens at all.

It will be interesting to see which bloggers quit now that the money train has come to a screeching halt.

Edit: Those that use the service "Text Link Ads" seem to have been targeted as Google feels that site and sites like it attempt to manipulate page ranks. I didn't have a problem with Google reducing page ranks, advertisers eventually figured out that page rank was just a phony baloney number that Google came up with and didn't really mean anything. Searches meant something. Now you literally CANNOT find a poker blog by searching the name of the site or the name of the blogger. Since that is specifically why a "search engine" is used, they have perverted their own reason for existing in order to punish us for abusing their phony baloney system.